CHAPTER XIII
I
Thursday night,
October 11, 1900.
Dear Judy: I said I’d write again to-night, so I shall, though I haven’t much to add to what I wrote last night. All day I’ve been troubled with doubts about the wisdom of this writing. But I have started it, and you’ll want the developments, and I need your help; so I’ll keep at it for a while, at any rate. Particularly, I am sure, you will want news of the family.
They are all saying, now, how splendidly Grandfather is coming through. He has got the cane that Chris duded with in the East, and he totters about with it, defying any one of us to think that he needs to use it. Physically, he is a dead game sport. But, mentally, darn it, Judy, I don’t know. Think this over. Is it like Grandfather to insist, in spite of everything, to insist without rhyme or reason, that someone sneaked in from the outside and killed Father, and got away again? No, sir, it is not like him. But that is what he is saying. I have decided that either Grandfather does think that I did it, and is putting up this con talk to save me, or else that, mentally, Grandfather has weakened a bit.
That brings the interesting speculation as to whether or not Grandfather would try to save me. I know this about him. He is the finest, straightest, wisest man I have ever known. (If Father had lived, he would have been as great as Grandfather, in the end. But Grandfather had an edge on Father of thirty-odd years of living, and experiencing, and acquiring knowledge and wisdom.) Giving that character to Grandfather—or to any man—would he, if he felt fairly certain that his grandson had killed his own father, even by mistake for another man, try to cover traces, shield him, and allow him to go free? I think that he would. You know, Grandfather has always been strong for the idea of usefulness connected with morality and the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number. He would think that, by saving me from punishment, he was saving the entire family from worse punishment. While my punishment would be a just one, theirs would be fearfully unjust. The family name would be disgraced. You and Lucy would be known as the sisters of a murderer—a parricide. Your children—had an uncle hanged. No, Grandfather would not stick that. A few months ago he wrote for Lucy, “Be generous, rather than just.” That is what he would do. He would let justice slide for me in order to be generous to the rest of the family. He would save me in order to save our standards, our traditions, and the other Quilters’ futures. And any one of us would do the same thing. I know it.
Olympe is still in bed. She quite simply lies there. I went in and talked to her a few minutes to-day. Unless the family stops this darn sentimental business of everyone trying to “spare” everyone else, we’ll make a fine showing on Friday at the inquest. I asked Olympe, straight, how she supposed it had happened that Uncle Phineas’s old gun was under her when the ladies picked her up from the floor.
She said that, since I was asking for suppositions, she supposed she had seized it—Olympe would never do less than “seize” a gun—and jumped from her bed before she fainted. It seems, when Uncle Phineas is away, that she always sleeps with his old gun under her pillow.
I told her that it had been unloaded. She said she knew it. She would have been afraid to sleep with the horrible, dangerous thing beneath her pillow if it were not unloaded.
Olympe’s guns would always be unloaded, wouldn’t they? As if her life were nothing but motions—useless things pretending usefulness; unrealities in the guise of reality. Her world is a stage, right enough, and she is more merely a player than it seems entirely moral for any living person to be.
She said she supposed it must have been the sound of the shot that frightened her, though she does not remember having heard the shot. (Dr. Joe says that is not at all unusual. That, often, when people faint from sudden fright, they do not remember the cause of their fright when they regain consciousness.) The last things that Olympe remembers are rubbing lotion on her hands, getting into bed, and blowing out the lamp on her bedside table.
I think that her prostration now is by way of being distinctive. Sorry. That is a crumby way for me to write of Olympe. I am tremendously fond of her, and she knows it.
Aunt Gracia is doing only fairly well. She looks ill. Her grief has intensified her aloofness. Grief is the first word to use; but it is grief plus horror with Aunt Gracia. She is convinced that some one of us, right here in the house now, murdered Father on Monday night. As always, she manages to be the most useful member of the family. She would die for any one of us, I believe; but she hates to live with us—excepting, of course, Grandfather and Lucy.
Lucy, poor little kid, is hit hard. She is up and around, and she helps Aunt Gracia. But she looks—frightful. You’d hardly know her. That shocked expression is still on her face, sort of stuck on it, like a mask. She was too skinny, anyway, and I’ll bet she has lost ten pounds since Monday night. She doesn’t cry. She slips about, working, or staying close to Grandfather. She has stopped reading. She has stopped writing. When she isn’t busy with the little duties Aunt Gracia finds for her, she huddles close to Grandfather—Chris says—or, when I am in the house, to me, and sits quietly with her tiny hands in her lap, and with that expression on her face. She took a tablet early this evening and began to write to you. She wrote about half a page, and then she walked across the room and tossed the entire tablet into the fire. I know why. Lucy will not write lies. She cannot write the truth. So she has quit.
Irene and Chris, I think, have come through better than the rest of us. Irene dared to say that she and Christopher still had their “great love.” All the rest of us, Aunt Gracia and Grandfather, Lucy and I, for instance, hate one another, I suppose. I should not suggest, though, that Irene is not affected, or that Chris is not. Irene cries most of the time. She is as shaky as an aspen, and hurt-seeming. She is not withdrawn, as Aunt Gracia is; but, poor girl, she gives the impression of trying to keep out of the way. I suppose grief is the most jealous and the most selfish of all emotions, and Irene senses it, even from Chris. We have no reason to expect her to feel as we feel, now; and since she cannot she is excluded and alone.
It is hard to write about Chris, or to understand him. He loved Father. He has something to endure that the rest of us haven’t—remorse. He made the last few months of Father’s life a hell on earth for him, and he knows it. When Chris thinks about our loss—he is white all the way through. But Chris, like the rest of us, has gone rather flooey. Judy, there is no good denying it—Chris is scared. And fear seems to make Chris rather yellow. I think it often does that to men and women.
Chris had got it into his head that, sooner or later, Irene is going to be blamed for this, because she was the only one who was not locked in a room on Monday night. So Chris has turned sleuth. An objectionable rôle at best, and one that Chris plays badly. On the square, Judy, it is a case of protesting too much. As nearly as I can judge, the one thing against Irene is her husband’s eagerness to prove that she is innocent. Everyone here except Chris knows that she is, without proof. I tried to give that to Chris to-day, but he would not have it.
He said it was charming of the family, but that after the inquest the law might step in. If it did, or when it did, he thought it would be well to have some proofs a bit more tangible, if less beautiful, than sweet family faith.
He has been rounding up these proofs of his since Monday night. If he has captured anything that is worth a cent for proof of anything, he has not informed me. This is the sort of thing he produces:
The rope—his informant was Aunt Gracia—had been in the attic for a year or more. It was bought to be used for a clothes-line. It was too thick for the clothespins to straddle, so it was put in the attic. This fact, that the rope was taken from our attic, Chris professes to believe is of enormous import. Remember little sentimental Lucy, aged four, when Uncle Phineas sneaked her off to the circus, inquiring as she watched the clown, “If he weren’t tho thad, would he be funny?”
To-day, Chris has been directing his attention to the question of who locked us all in our rooms. I told him that meant, merely, that he was directing his attention to who murdered Father. Any boob would know that whoever did the one thing did the other. He essayed shrewdness with his “Perhaps.”
II
Later on Thursday night.
As I finished writing that last paragraph Aunt Gracia came into the sitting room. I think she suspects that I am giving you the truth, though she neither accuses nor questions. She had brought some darning with her, and for the first time since Tuesday morning she seemed to wish to talk. So I have put this aside for an hour, and we have been talking.
It is Chris, I suppose, who has started Aunt Gracia to worrying about the locked doors. She asked me if it didn’t seem strange to me that anyone could have gone through the upper hall, locking all the doors, and not have waked any of us.
I told her, perhaps a bit, but not very strange. She and Lucy and I sleep like stones and always have. Olympe is slightly deaf. Chris is a sound sleeper, too; and if he had heard someone monkeying around he would have thought it was Irene. Irene, downstairs, with the doors closed and locked, couldn’t have heard anyone who was trying to be quiet in the upper hall.
“That is all very well,” she said, “but what about your grandfather? Do you think that anyone could open his door, remove the key from the inside lock, close the door and lock it on the outside, without his hearing a sound? He sleeps like an Indian.”
“For that matter,” I said, “Father slept lightly, too. But the doors were locked, and no one heard it being done. Why bother with conjectures when we have facts?”
She declared that we had no facts, as yet. She said that I was wrong about Father sleeping lightly. That is, he had not been sleeping lightly of late, because there was something to make him sleep heavily in the medicine Dr. Joe had been prescribing for him. She said she meant to talk to Dr. Joe about that, later. Just now, she wished to talk to me about the locked doors.
“What I believe,” she said, “is that the keys for the doors were collected sometime early in the evening, or, perhaps, in the afternoon. Then, when the murderer slipped through the hall that night he had nothing to do but fit the keys into the locks and turn them. It is possible that Father would not have heard so slight a sound as that. It is not possible that anyone could have opened his door without his hearing it. Not one of us, I think, except Irene would have noticed if our key was not in its lock when we went to bed. Not one of us used our bedroom key, except Irene.”
“Was her key in the lock when she went to bed?” I asked.
Aunt Gracia said, “I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you ask her?” I suggested.
“I have asked her.”
“Couldn’t she remember? Or wouldn’t she tell you?”
“Yes, she told me. She said that it was not in the lock. She said she missed it, at once, and told Christopher that it was gone. He said, no matter—something of the sort.”
“Well, Aunt Gracia?” I asked. I guess she could see the chip on my shoulder. I don’t like Irene a bit better than Aunt Gracia likes her. But I seem to like fair play a lot better than Aunt Gracia does.
“Well,” she sort of mocked, “since the key was missing at nine o’clock, doesn’t it seem odd to you that when, at eleven or thereabouts, Irene found the door locked against her, she should have decided that Christopher had locked her out?”
“Not at all,” I said. “She was angry, and her feelings were hurt. Why should she stop to wonder about the key? The door was locked, wasn’t it? Irene and I seem, at least, to have a feeling for facts in common. The door was locked. All right—Chris could have got up, found the key, and locked it, couldn’t he? Keys aren’t stationary things.”
“Evidently not,” Aunt Gracia said, without lifting her eyes from her sewing. “I’ve asked everyone but you, Neal. No one can say whether his key was on the inside or outside of his lock, that night, or whether it was missing entirely. Do you know about the key to your door?”
I didn’t, of course. I hadn’t touched the thing since she had put it in the lock, weeks ago.
“No one,” she said, “in this house, ever touched keys, or thought keys, but Irene. Understand, Neal,” she went on quickly, because, I think, she saw that her injustice was making me hot, “I do not think that Irene walked into Dick’s room on Monday night and shot him. I do know this. We all know it. Irene was out in the hall that night, with the keys to all the doors. She could lock or unlock as she chose. She could have locked us all in our rooms. She could have spent the ten minutes or so, after we heard the shot, in Dick’s room with him as she says she did, or she could have spent that time in helping someone to escape, or hide, or——(Dick’s last words, as quoted by Irene, particularly the ‘red mask’ remark, did not carry conviction to me. Did they to you?) Then, when she was certain that her—shall we say friend?—her friend was safe, she could have unlocked our doors. Lucy’s first—the child of the household.
“Fine!” I said. “Except that no one was hidden in the house, and that no one has escaped. Irene unlocked Lucy’s door because it was straight in front of her as she ran from Father’s room. If, as you’ve been hinting, Irene had planned with somebody to kill Father, would she have agreed to a plan that would put her in the position she is in now—that is, the only one of us who was not locked in a room?”
“Irene is stupid. She might have agreed blindly, if the person who did the planning was clever. But there is this, Neal. I repeat, I insist that Irene is stupid. Suppose, this seems more probable, that whoever planned to kill Dick did not tell Irene the truth about what he was planning to do. Suppose he made her believe that something else—no, I have no idea what—was going to be done that night. The rope might come into it there. And the snow probably spoiled some extra plan. No one could have reckoned on snow in October. In all my memory, snow in October has come just once before this—that was when I was a little girl. In other words, suppose that Irene helped, but unwittingly—as a dupe, a cat’s-paw. That is possible, isn’t it?”
“No,” I said. “Irene couldn’t keep a secret to save her life. If she had got mixed up in this, but was innocent of any wrong intentions, she would have told Chris, either purposely or by mistake. It takes stouter stuff than Irene has to keep a secret at a time like this. If she had told Chris anything of that sort, he would have told us. You may, or may not, have a right to doubt Irene’s honesty. You can’t doubt Chris’s—not in an affair of this sort.”
“I can,” Aunt Gracia said. “I do. I doubt everyone in this house, for one reason or another, except your Grandfather and, perhaps, Lucy.”
That “perhaps” made me see red. “And yourself?” I said. I was a mucker for saying it as I did.
She answered me quietly: “No. Sometimes I doubt myself.”
“That’s all right,” I said, “but you can stop doubting Lucy, here and now——”
“I have never thought,” Aunt Gracia interrupted, “that Lucy walked into Dick’s room and shot him. Don’t be absurd, Neal.”
“Whatever you thought about her,” I said, “makes no particular difference. She was in my room within two minutes, within a minute, I should say, after the shot was fired. If you could have seen her then——” I was too sore to try to talk about it.
“Yes. I knew about her coming directly into your room, Neal,” was what Aunt Gracia said with words.
I got up and put a log on the fire. I didn’t dare trust myself to answer her.
After a minute or two, she went on talking. She wished that I would stop standing up for Irene. She said that it didn’t matter what I said to the family; but, when outsiders, people in authority, came to question me, she thought it unnecessary for me to make my defences of Irene so angrily and so staunchly. She finished by saying: “You don’t like her, Neal. You have never liked her. You have said to me that you hated her. Why should you, now, take this attitude toward her? You resent even her husband’s attempts to prove her story—resent them on the grounds that Irene never could, under any provocation, do an unworthy deed.”
“Rot!” I said. “Look here, there is a difference between an unworthy deed, as you say, and murder—or even helping a murderer along.”
“To be sure,” she said.
I decided to answer her, this time. “Do you believe,” I said, “that I murdered Father, and that Irene helped me?”
“I think,” she answered, straight, “that Irene had to help either you, or Christopher, or Olympe—or someone from the outside who has eluded us. My clear thinking forces me to give up hope of an outsider. You notice that I have left out Father, myself, and Lucy. The madness of the past few days has, sometimes, made me almost doubt myself; but I know that is madness—nothing else. No one could doubt Father, or Lucy—I suppose.”
“All right, Aunt Gracia,” I answered—I can’t explain it, but her saying that she had had moments of doubting herself was mighty good for me to hear—“let’s look at it this way. What reason would Chris, or Olympe, or you—let’s include you—or I have for killing Father? I mean, why would any one of us have done it?”
“Why does anyone ever murder?” she asked. “Because, since his mind his not become one with his Creator’s mind, he can lose it—can be insane for a longer or shorter time. Why did Dick murder Enos Karabass?”
“Because he tried to assault Mother,” I answered.
“So Dick said, and, I suppose—believed. Enos loved me. He worshipped me, I tell you. I loved—worshipped him. Our punishment came because we did worship each other, instead of our Creator. But, loving me as he did, and loving all women because of me, do you suppose—— Oh, how mad of me to talk to you like this! No matter. I will say it. Dick was insanely, wildly jealous. You are Dick’s son. But vengeance is the Lord’s. If you did do this thing, I hope you may go free, as Dick went free; and that, before you die, you may be saved, forgiven, and ready to enter one of the highest states of glory, as Dick was ready.”
I don’t know why that didn’t make me hot. It didn’t. It was as if I’d had a curtain over a part of my mind, and Aunt Gracia’s accusation had drawn it aside, and had shown me, in the light, that the dim, queer things I had sort of halfway feared myself, were—cobwebs.
My own relief, I suppose, made me capable of sympathy for her. I was dead sorry for her, and her doubts, and her poor, battered-up love affair. I tried to say what I thought might comfort her.
“It was a wonderful thing, Aunt Gracia,” I proffered, “that, if Father had to die, he should have died so soon after his baptism. That he could go, as you say, saved, forgiven, and ready for one of the highest states of glory——”
She interrupted me sharply: “Why do you talk to me like that? You don’t believe any of it, and I know that you don’t. What are you trying to do? Trap me?”
“Trap you?” I echoed like a fool. I didn’t get her at all. You know how I am, Judy. I can use the old bean all right, but it takes time—plenty and plenty of time. Mark Twain, wasn’t it, who said, “When in doubt, tell the truth?” I tried it. “I was attempting to comfort you, dear,” I said.
“No, you weren’t,” she rewarded me. “But you have. You have made me remember. Sometimes I forget. What you have just said is the meaning of it all. That is why I can endure it. Anything that has a meaning can be endured.”
She went away quickly, and left me alone. I have been sitting here, trying to think.
“Trap me,” she said. Can you beat it, Judy? You see her meaning, don’t you? Chris, as a sleuth, has done much talking about motives. If Aunt Gracia had wished to be sure that Father would attain one of those highest states of her glory——— You see? Before Father had had time to backslide. A motive for Aunt Gracia. But who would ever have thought of it but Aunt Gracia herself?
Isn’t she the queerest proposition? Just when we get to thinking that she is almost loony, she snaps around on us and is brighter than we are. No mind that was not in excellent working condition could have caught me up like that, “What are you trying to do? Trap me?” in half a second.
Though, as you know, Judy, all this is rot. Suppose we got about it as Chris has been going of late. Suppose we try to put salt on the tails of nonexistent clues, and to materialize what Chris chooses to call “proofs” out of the air.
Aunt Gracia’s voice was the one Lucy and I heard first, and all the time on Monday night, calling and calling to Grandfather from behind her locked door. Aunt Gracia has lived a good many years now with one of her high states of glory as her own objective. Would she sacrifice it for Father’s sake? She would not. If she had been guilty, would she have revealed her motive, offhand, to me? She would not. All this, you understand, would be Chris’s “proofs.” Mine would be that I know Aunt Gracia. That I have known her all my life. That she is a Quilter—Grandfather’s daughter and Father’s sister. These are good enough proofs for me.
Your loving brother,
Neal.